The works featured on Grand Piano’s second volume of piano music by the prolific and multifaceted Croatian composer Blagoje Bersa (1873-1934) often prove as colourful and unabashedly virtuoso as those on the previous volume (3/18), if hardly as substantial, musically speaking.

Bersa’s Ballade in D minor seemingly fuses the ‘rocking horse’ rhythm of Chopin’s Third Ballade with the populist side of Spanish Impressionism. If the Rondo-Polonaise’s inspiration rarely rises beyond its predictable sequential patterns, it’s hard to resist the music’s infectious energy, especially through Goran Filipec’s powerful and irrepressible fingers.

The early Valse in A major, Op 3, channels Johann Strauss II’s multi-thematic works in this genre but without truly memorable melodies. By contrast, the pithy main theme of the Valse mélancolique, Op 76, is hard to forget once you’ve heard it. It took me a while to aurally link the attractive and fluent Tema con variazioni with the harmonic scheme of the concluding variation movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No 30. On the other hand, listeners familiar with Mozart’s C minor Sonata, K457, will discover its major-key iteration via Bersa’s own Sonata. Among this collection’s myriad shorter works, I’m most drawn to the Bizarra serenada’s quirky harmonic shifts, the Fantasia breve’s brooding intensity and An Old Sailor’s Telling’s mournful aura.

Although listeners curious about Bersa should first investigate the altogether stronger compositions featured on Vol 1, Filipec’s masterful advocacy deserves the highest praise, and so do his informative booklet annotations.